Hacker News Reader

Comment by redial | Hacker News Reader

I do not know much about Bitcoin or other crypto coins, but how can it be more efficient if it takes on average[1] almost an hour for a transaction to be validated? Credit card, Apple Pay, Ali Pay, etc. are instant.

[1] https://coincentral.com/how-long-do-bitcoin-transfers-take/

View on HN

Credit cards are not instant. They take several days before they post. And you can spend more USD in your bank account than is actually there up to a certain extent, causing "overdraft" (if you allow it). The hour that you wait for BTC is to make sure it can't be taken back. A credit card transaction can even be taken back after it has completely cleared called a "chargeback".

BTC is actually instant. You don't even need internet access! But to make sure it can't be taken back, we wait an hour.

There was a quote by Andreas Antonopoulos (Mastering Bitcoin) saying something about the cost vs. risk and how you can afford to sell a cup of coffee instantly without fearing a double-spend attack. You might wait for one or two blocks to be confirmed before you sell a laptop. That scales exponentially for six blocks being so expensive to double-spend past that it'd cost you a hangar ship.

there are alternative coins that are much faster. plus there are many of them, so if a blockchain is slow, people will theoretically be able to switch to another. having 3-4 different coins in our digital wallets doesn't seem like its going to be a huge hassle, especially if it is going to be easy to exchange between them.

Smaller coins are very inexpensive to double-spend.

There was someone on hacker news some months back who collected donations to proof-of-concept abuse one or more.

So a safer alternative would be a token coin on Ethereum, since you're not actually switching to a microscopic, unknown and thus abusable blockchain.

> Credit card, Apple Pay, Ali Pay, etc. are instant.

Not really. There's a settlement period, and if the transaction can be reversed, it's really not complete in the sense of a Bitcoin transaction with 6 confirmations.

The transaction may not be truly completed, but it was validated instantly.

Which in Bitcoin's case, would be a 0-confirmation transaction, which is visible pretty much immediately as well.

0-confirmation seems to be just a placeholder, so I do not think it is comparable at all to a credit card verification.

I do not want to nitpick but credit cards validate, that is to say they verify the parts in a transaction and resolve instantly if it can or cannot take place, and then it does take place instantly. That you can "take it back" is a feature independent of the actual operation. The settlement period is not a technological imposition but a human one; it is in place because humans are not trustworthy.

On Bitcoin on the other hand, the limitation is inherently technical. The protocol verification methods are slow by design.

That's a deliberate (and extremely useful) feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com